


There is No Sign of Land

by Aliza



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Domestic, F/M, Illustrated, black/pale flip, casual thievery of dresswear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-13
Updated: 2012-11-13
Packaged: 2017-11-18 14:50:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliza/pseuds/Aliza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>christening my fanfiction career with something truly awful<br/>welcome to the rose/eridan rumpus apocalypse</p>
            </blockquote>





	There is No Sign of Land

“Come a little closer before the fuck is utterly bored outta me, will you? Unless you don't want a shot at ruinin' my pretty face, which admittedly I'd understand.”

“Gracious, what a surprise to my delicate sensibilities. I didn't know you had any fuck in you. Perhaps you ought to broadcast it a little louder, I'm not sure they can quite hear you in distant universes.”

“I have to don't I, since maybe there's somefin out there willin' to start a thing rather than stand around throwin' petty insults back an forth! Enough with the pleasantries alright, onto the main fuckin' event.”

You slip your thorns out of your sylladex in a flash. He retrieves his own wands, the inverse twins of yours. They glitter and flash in his hands like starlight and strobe lights. His face stretches out in a wide, sharklike parody of a grin.

“Fuckin' finally.”

Loathe as you are to make him happy in any circumstance, in this case you have to concur. 

Your heels dig into the ground. He attacks in a blast of light and you are no longer there. A Rose constructed of smoke and shadow dies in your place, white holes riddled through its midsection. 

Ampora's favorite place to attack, despite its impracticality.

You are on the other side of him now and he turns, getting a blast of violet light across the cheek for his trouble. “I thought one didn't kill one's kismesis.”

He laughs in a manic, high-pitched trill.“You have no idea what you're playin' at--”

You shoot again, this time directly at the chest. The blast is absorbed in a wall of white and shit he's fast, advancing already. You do the same. He meets you more than halfway, highbood-fast, both of you raising your wands. This time you aim for the neck.

You lunge toward him; he does the same and suddenly your mouths meet, his wands sparking in your hair, yours pressing hard against his wounded cheek. Your tongue slips into his mouth and you run it along his tongue, then the roof of his mouth. The ridges feel alien and strange and he shivers, tasting of saltwater, like tears and the sea. If your mouth were not otherwise occupied you would wonder aloud at how bitter he tastes, a perfect complement to his emotional bitterness. 

Your hands are in his gillflaps, running along the frilly ridges of his ears. His teeth are tearing at your bottom lip as his claws shred back of your dress in a way that will be very painful if he makes it through to the skin. Then he shifts gears somewhat and sticks his hand clumsily up your shirt. His fingers are disgustingly clammy.

You push at his chest and he refuses to budge. That avenue having been exhausted, you slap him across the face and then, turning slightly, punch him in the solar plexus. He crumples like a doll. Troll anatomy isn't so different after all, you decide. Another scientific victory for the human race. You smile and press your lips to his neck, bite at the line of his jaw. His skin is thick and strangely smooth, like a porous plastic. When your teeth pinch and rip through it he's near hyperventilating. It's too high a bite for him to conceal later, where his jaw curves under his ear. His blood is the most wonderful color; it has the most wonderful taste. Like human blood, almost exactly like human blood, but frigid, bitter, oddly saccharine and very salty. 

The world twists abruptly sideways and your lungs fill with water. A wave hits and you roll, confused, the wave has claws-- no-- your head crooks upward, you are grappling with him again, futilely, waiting for him to drag you down like a crocodile’s prey into the deep where you will drown bloated and white as any lusus he has killed--

No again. You are dragging him down as he struggles. You gasp what feels like a gallon of water through your mouth. Oxygen rushes to your brain and your translucent secondary eyelids shutter closed, leaving your vision clear. The two of you are suspended in the water, no longer fighting or snogging or sniping, just staring. His eyes are violet and nacreous and completely arresting in a way that looks utterly stupid and trying-too-hard. Your grip on his shoulders is tight enough to release purple clouds into the water and, looking closely, you can see faint wavering tendrils slipping from your ash-gray fingers, dropping and curling through the water around him. You have no idea why this momentarily surprised you.

 

Rose ==> wake up

 

It's absolutely freezing in this room. The bed sheets wrapped around your legs are doing absolutely nothing to help. It's also not helping that the other occupant of the bed has the core temperature of a reptile. 

Your phone is sitting on the floor, where someone knocked it off the bedside table like an inconsiderate, unconscionable chariot of dicks drawn by a team of elegant douchehorses. Dave's vernacular is beginning to rub off on you. 

Speaking of someone, there is a gray hand inching along under the covers. The landscape of your bed shifts as he finds a more comfortable sleeping position. The obvious thing to do is look at him while he's vulnerable as a new kismesis experiment; after all, it's been said that people look more like children while sleeping, more innocent and, ultimately, pitiable. His lips are parted, his chest moving slightly as he breathes... no, he still looks like a fish that washed up dead on the beach. You are both relieved and pleased.

As you observe him he stirs in what might be an ancient alternian instinct to prevent enemies from surprising one, but might also be his uniquely abysmal sense of timing. You haven't even showered yet. What is he doing waking up in the morning anyway, and why-- oh, it's late afternoon. Still, your criticism stands.

“Well hey there,” he says. He waggles his eyebrows in a half-trying, sleepy sort of way. “Dream about me, did you?”

You don't bother answering. “I'm going to use the shower.”

“Hey well, I hope you have fun in there. Didn't wanna talk to you anyway.”

“Please refrain from displays of passive-aggression until you are lucid, Mr. Ampora. You are being painfully transparent. Refrain from sexual double-entendres altogether, forever, until the end of time.”

“How bout you. Shut up.” He sits up and tugs his pants on. The buttons are too thorny a problem for him to give you his full attention. You leave him to it.

It takes you a moment to grasp the true breadth and scope of the hair products in his bathroom. You take a little extra time after showering to pour the contents of a few bottles into several of the others, but by then there are already scents drifting in from his cramped vegetarian nightmare of a kitchenette.

He's started the heater up too, so now the room is almost uncomfortably warm instead of too cold.You wear his shirt (bright violet dress shirt, dry-clean only, found hanging in his closet in a place of particular reverence) and your underwear and dear sweet many-tendriled horrorgods he's made a pot of coffee and it smells better than anything any of your senses have ever encountered. 

“My favorite shirt, you heartless hag from the writhing depths a shit hell,” he says by way of greeting.

“Give me that pot of coffee immediately.”

“Give me back my shirt, it has to be hand pressed and I have a pair a cufflinks that I bought special, that shirt is sacred fuckin territory, you absolute hellbat.”

You take it off and hand it to him before pouring yourself a cup of coffee. “Is this the fair trade pesticide-free blend you mentioned?”

“Yes and look how you repay me for bustin out the good shit for a lady. Cannot fuckin believe.”

As he brushes the shirt his eyes flick back and forth between it and your breasts as if they do not know which is more important.

“Cannot fuckin believe this shit.”

“You said that.”

He sits the shirt down on the table and comes over to your spot against the counter and leans against you, trying to get you to fold backward for some reason. This distracts you long enough for him to land a bite, a shallow one, on the front of your shoulder. You find yourself hissing, pulling your arm back to land a punch directly across his cheekbone. He jerks backward and it looks like he's going to fall, but he grabs your arm and you both go down. 

He is a fucking idiot. Your cup of coffee falls against his chest, drenching and scalding him. He lets out a loud, guttural noise like an engine failing to start. You put your mouth against his earfrills and start to say something, then forget when he turns his head and kisses you, which is like kissing a shark with a mouthful of razors. The two of you lean awkwardly against the kitchen counter and that lets him get his claws down your back, and you wish for just a moment that you could still perform the sideways mental dive into the furthest ring, that you'd retained a more physical power from the game than faint precognition. His game powers manifest in a powerful ability to fuck everything up. He carves another line of fire down the side of your spine and then pops his claw into his mouth. He makes a big show of sucking it clean, which is less sexy and more silly than he probably thinks.

You get his lower lip between your teeth and bite at it, hard. He's making the engine-failure noise at a steady pace now. Your hands, for lack of anything better to do, begin tearing at the front of his pants. You get your leg between his thighs and press upward as hard as you can in this position, and his noises change in pitch. It's like flipping through different kinds of radio static, and when he says things it's too distorted to quite understand. Alternian and english are not quite the same language when spoken, and his accent is thick as syrup when he's like this. You stop kissing him for a moment to wrench his pants open, and he's clawing the sides of your underwear now too.

“Fuck, hold on, wait,” he says, scooting back and tugging his pants off. You remove your underwear and set them aside, or fling them away, you don't care which. This floor really is uncomfortable. You're about to suggest going back to the bed when he finishes undressing, but he's so beautifully terrible, the lines of him, the alien way his muscles are under his wine-and-ashes skin.

Then you're back together and he's mumbling things into your throat. You catch fragments of what he says, like hate you, fucking hate you forever until the sea boils and the stars go out. Fucking kill you, drown you. Hate you when you're dead. Hate you when we're both dead. And you're answering in turn, unconscionable fuck, I'll kill you a thousand times, god I hope I'm not stuck with you forever. You grab his horns and wrench his head backward, you breathe into the hollow of his collarbone. He's so salty, you wonder how a person could taste this salty without shriveling.

You tussle like kids on the floor until you find a position that neither of you is happy with. By now you're past complete sentences. He breathes your name like a curse. The two of you fuck like there'll be trophies awarded at the end, as if you have to beat him at fucking. He comes in a wave of violet and then a few moments later you do, in spasms, and it's walking the fine line between ecstatic and horrifying. Afterwords it's necessary to lie there for a moment wrapped around each other. He doesn't seem quite done even; his hips make small, arrhythmic movements against nothing. You pull your fingers through his hair. His horns are cool to the touch, velvety at the base. And they're lovely.

He looks at you as if he's not sure who won and wishes he knew.

“Ros, this is so fuckin' uncomfortable an sticky.”

“Shh. I know.”

His thumbs make slow circlets on your wrist, your waist. “You were good though, you did real well.”

“Don't patronize me, Eridan.” He hums softly and runs his fingers up and down your arm. Along the marks he made on your back, as if double-checking to make sure he did a good job.

“You alright there, I mean, you need like some iodine or what?”

"I'm fairly certain you're not supposed to be the one tending to the cuts you administered. That doesn't seem very hateful to me.”

"Well!" he says, mock offended, “Want you in one piece don't I, don't want you wiltin' an dyin' on me like a fuckin hothouse orchid, I mean you got skin like load gaper tissue or peaches or somethin'.”

“No thank you, I don't think I want your digits about my person for any longer than necessary.”

You are the first to stand back up, on admittedly unsteady legs. You gather your things and leave without looking at the mess on the kitchen floor. Before you go he kisses you at the door, just a peck, an afterthought, like the two of you have been together for years and this is part of your routine. You wonder which of you is doing the most damage.

It strikes you that this drawn-out horror of a relationship is going to keep happening. It's a disaster in slow-motion playing out in your mind. When you get home there will be a vaguely disquieting hate-letter waiting for you on your computer in purple text, and as an afterthought he will tell you where you can get his special coffee bean blend. And it will carry on until he is, whether you like it or not, a part of your life, like a particularly aggressive species of fungus or an ant infestation. And the worst part, truly, is realizing that you want him to be.

You notice a sleeve of his favorite shirt sticking out of your purse and you tuck it back in. Perhaps you will wear it as pajamas.


End file.
